Segway Is Making A Personal Robot

There is no doubt that you have probably seen someone one moving about with one of their electronic scooters – a Segway. Now the company behind those unique transportation devices is looking to expand in the personal robotics market as they have unveiled the Segway Advanced Personal Robot.

So what exactly is a Segway Advanced Personal Robot? For starters, it’s a robot that you can actually ride and according to the company he can navigate and follow as well. On the inside the robot uses an Intel Atom processor along with the Android OS, it also has an interface for hardware extensions – people could essentially make their own add-ons. It has an extendable neck with a display screen that can pass on some nifty emojis – it also houses several camera types – depth sensing, fisheye tracking camera, and a photo camera. Having independent cameras for specific roles seems like a smart move.

Segway is looking to start shipping the Segway Robot Developer Edition in early Q3 2016. It will come with the full SDK so that developers can get a head start in doing some pretty cool things.

While this isn’t the first time we have seen someone attempt to provide general consumers with a personal robot, for some reason this one seems much more practical than the others ones we have seen in the past. Perhaps it’s the size or the advancement of technology that contributes to that. In any case its pretty neat and I hope it catches on.